John Thompson is a historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma.
He writes:
I have very strong, positive and negative feelings about Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System and How to Fix It. For better and/or the worse, the Oklahoma State Department of Education has committed to what Wexler calls science-based reading instruction and what many experts see as another push for phonics, paired with an assault on so-called “Progressivism.”
My big worry is the way that some of her hypotheses are being appropriated by privatizers in their latest attacks on public schools.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0735213550/theatla05-20/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff/592765/
And since former Chief for Change Janet Baressi, who pushed for the retention of 3rd graders based on their reading scores, is running for Congress, Oklahoma educators need to participate in an evidence-based evaluation of Wexler’s book and respond to many of her sources, out-of-state think tanks seeking to restore the test and punish policies we’ve repealed or made less destructive.
Surely we can agree that that corporate school reform has damaged reading instruction, especially for our poorest children, by narrowing the curriculum and expanding test prep. Wexler notes, “The amount of time spent on social studies and science has plummeted—especially in schools where test scores are low.” Teachers are forced to “focus on a ‘skill of the week,’” robbing students of opportunities to learn the background knowledge necessary to read for comprehension.
The best parts of The Knowledge Gap, I believe, are not its analyses of research; even though I lack the expertise to prove it, my sense is that Wexler oversimplifies when interpreting how academic research applies to policy. (For instance, I’ve long admired Dan Willingham, who she often cites, and I would be surprised if he were to claim that adopting methods based on his cognitive research, alone, would produce such transformative gains.)
I most respect Wexler’s insights that come from tutoring or watching children in class. For instance, she shows how divorced Common Core is from reality (which is my wording, not Wexler’s). She describes a 1st grader who was supposed to “draw conclusions” using “a dense article describing Brazil,” but who thought her assignment was to “draw clowns.”
Wexler does a great job, joining teachers and parents, in criticizing “test prep.” However, she then adds, teachers “haven’t focused on the more fundamental problem.” And that foreshadows the problems with The Knowledge Gap. Its targets include the decades of progressivism and the “antipathy” of educators who refuse to see the evidence she cites with “their own eyes.”
After criticizing No Child Left Behind for driving social studies from the curriculum, Wexler places equal or greater blame on progressive orthodoxy. She writes, “Perhaps the most powerful belief teachers absorb during their training is that education should be a natural, pleasurable, process and that learning or (heaven forbid) memorizing is inherently boring and soul-destroying.”
Given the extreme damage done to our poorest children of color by accountability-driven, market-driven reformers who have long slandered classroom teachers, I was most upset by Wexler’s attack on my colleagues:
”Today’s child-centered progressive educators – and the many who have unconsciously absorbed the movement’s shibboleths – sincerely want our education system to function as an engine of social and economic mobility. … But by denying less privileged children access to knowledge, they are doing just as much to perpetuate existing inequities as their distant cousins who invented tracking: the social efficiency progressives.”
(And as a former social historian, I’m annoyed by the linkage of today’s child-centered progressives with social efficiency progressives; its corporate school reform that is rooted in Taylorism and social efficiency progressivism.)
At times, Wexler sounds like a lawyer parsing words carefully in defense of her client, corporate school reformers trying to blame educators for the failure of their agenda. For instance, she verges on ridiculing educators who prioritize “critical thinking” and “learning to learn,” but her precise argument is that “foregrounding” such skills is the problem.
Then, such nuance may be followed by a broad assertion like, “What the vast majority of educators, reformers, commentators, and government officials still haven’t realized is that elementary school is where the real problem has been hiding, in plain sight.” I wish she had mentioned social scientists as members of the majority who don’t accept her hypothesis.
Wexler critiques Common Core literacy standards which, she says, “have in many ways made a bad situation worse.” In the majority of classrooms, she concludes, “the results can be disastrous” because teachers “may put impenetrable text in front of kids and just let them struggle. Or, perhaps, draw clowns.”
Wexler also defends Common Core advocates like David Coleman, for instance, saying that his vision was “not necessarily incompatible” with E.D. Hirsch’s. Rather than provide real world evidence for such an implausible assertion, she shifts some of the blame to the 3/4ths of teachers who “believe incorrectly” that Common Core calls for “texts on individualized reading levels and skills over content.” Even if that blanket statement isn’t inaccurate, where did that belief come from – teachers’ misreading of Common Core or the mandates they received by administrators complying with the main thrust of an experiment that hadn’t been thought through?
I wish Wexler would acknowledge how the real harm of Common Core came from the combination of complex, confusing, untested standards with high stakes testing – even punishing individual teachers, children, and GED test takers in inappropriate and ill-conceived punitive systems. Had she done so, perhaps Wexler would have realized that the supposed sins of the “status quo” were the predictable results of test and punish, market-driven reforms, not the perverse stubbornness of educators.
Often, Wexler is fair to classroom teachers, such as those in an urban district who have long had to deal with a “significant reform initiative” every three months. She says that figuring out both how to teach and what to teach which is “a nearly impossible task.” And she agrees that Common Core made that ordeal worse.
But, Wexler notes that teachers have denied that it’s realistic to expect struggling students to read at grade level as Common Core requires. She offers some anecdotes in support of her dubious suggestion that it is possible to do that at scale. She also adds, implausibly, “perhaps it’s only unrealistic because of the content-adverse approach they have championed is what is holding those students back.” And that leads to the type of statement that offends us teachers who have dedicated our lives to our students, “millions of kids … are only waiting for someone to actually teach them something to unlock their potential.”
Moreover, raising standards and teaching for reading comprehension is much more difficult in a society where only 32% of students could identify Civil War dates within fifty years. And Wexler acknowledges that high learning standards have not worked because the time it would take to master them would require students to attend school until grade 21 or 22. But she seems to mostly blame the lack of knowledge on progressive orthodoxy for not teaching elementary social studies and for social studies pushing history out of the curriculum.
So, Wexler praises the international systems that use a “detailed national curriculum along with tests based on it,” and she wants to add essay questions to standardized tests. Wexler blames the lack of such a curriculum and tests on “politics.” Her solution would be better writing instruction.
When it comes to edu-politics, Wexler tends to be more sympathetic to reformers than to practitioners. When Diane Ravitch told her that “poverty is a bigger problem than curriculum,” she could have studied the social science which backs up Ravitch. It sounds to me that that she claims that poor Michelle Rhee couldn’t tackle the need for curriculum because she would have then been beat up by Ravitch.
But when Wexler complains about Lucy Calkins, “just one of several prominent balanced literacy gurus,” she’ll make statements like, “The only problem for Calkins …” Wexler then indicated that part of that problem was Calkins’ rejection of scripted lessons. Rather than lengthen this review by addressing that issue, I’ll respond to a worrisome pattern in The Knowledge Gap. Never in my decades of experience have I seen problems or solutions that come from only one source, and I never had to satisfy Joel Klein while transforming much of New York City’s education system.
I became more suspicious of Wexler’s recommendations near the end of her book where she describes Washoe County, NV, which in 2011 just sought to teach the 18% of standards that are on the test. Those “power standards” were called “jackpot standards” by teachers who complied with them. She praised the grassroots effort to customize the program.
She acknowledges the role of Fordham and others in pushing Common Core and she acknowledges problems with Common Core. But she mostly trusts their complaints about implementation. So, it becomes a part of her theme of failed implementation by educators deserves more blame.
Next, Wexler seems to be reporting on the facts on the ground that explain why reformers failed. She describes posters embraced by reformers proclaiming to elementary students, “TRY HARD!,” “No fear!,” and “Believe!” She seems disdainful of their efforts to stop the “3rd grade PARCC worry chain,” and “leaving our fears outside.” As she approaches the chapter “Scaling Up: Can It Be Done?,” Wexler concludes that section by reporting on a dynamic charter teacher who leaves her high-challenge class.
But the optimism in Wexler’s final chapters seems to be based the narratives presented by Klein and his “devotees” like John King and John White. She points out the success of a kid who had been in the “dumb group” but who flourished when using the package, “Wit and Wisdom.” Her greatest hope seems to be the Core Knowledge Learning Arts program (CKLA), and she says that thousands of schools use it, but she offers no research-based evidence of its successes.
https://dianeravitch.net/2019/11/10/john-thompson-how-billionaire-reformers-messed-up-the-public-schools-of-tulsa/
https://www.tulsakids.com/is-ckla-the-best-way-to-teach-children-to-read/
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/curriculum-advocates-prepare-long-hard-struggle?mc_cid=1972e93aed&mc_eid=3095764e3b
The book closes without evidence that CKLA is can be scaled up. Scouring her footnotes, I found no support for her analysis except for Fordham Institute advocates. Interestingly, after Wexler (and Emily Hanford) participated in the Research Ed conference last week, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli came out with an even tougher strategy for implementing Wexler’s agenda. He proposes a Vergara-style lawsuit against states that don’t provide “scientifically based reading instruction.” The head of a think tank that specializes in spreading junk science, Petrilli, believes:
Putting the defenders of whole language and balanced literacy on trial would be its own form of justice—one that might even lead education schools nationwide to get religion on the science of reading.
And when Billionaires Boys Club’s lobbyists, especially from Fordham, return to Oklahoma to promote the Chief for Change’s Baressi’s and other teacher-bashers’ memes, I hope legislators will listen to Tulsa teachers who despise CKLA.
I agree with Wexler’s thesis and look forward to reading the book.
When one begins with the tired and overused Nation at Risk falsehood that public education is broken, the whole argument — whatever it may be — falls apart. People really need to stop having paranoid Sputnik moments. We are public school teachers. Give us a living wage, a pension, small classes, nurses, counselors, and librarians; and step aside. Let us do what we’ve been doing an amazing job of for decades, educating all instead of some. Let us do the job without all the interference. Let us debate phonics versus whole language in scholarly publications and in the teachers lounge if we decide we need to debate it. Without all the scare tactics. Let us teach.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Education has become a political football in which the “reform” crowd blame teachers for poverty and all of society’s shortcomings. Their attacks are false and unrelenting. After the banks and corporations tanked our economy in 2008, we saw fewer articles blaming the businesses that were actually responsible for their reckless, unethical policies that damaged our economy. Public schools and teachers are tired of the unjustified scapegoating.
Shall teachers be immune from criticism? Not all criticism is equal. The Deformers lazily concluded that teachers were lazy and dumb. That’s false. But Wexler is saying something different: that teachers have imbibed bad ideas. This is true IMHO. I have met a lot of teachers; not one describes knowledge transmission as the central component of their practice.
Teaching is a very complex multitude of functions. Knowledge transmission is part of it. Processing the knowledge is necessary for memory formation, though, so thinking, creating, discussing, etc. are also important. Teachers have to be aware of many approaches and know when to use them. To make a golf analogy, I need more than one club in my bag. The answer to the question in education, “Should we do this or should we do that?” is “Sometimes.” Conditions vary. Also, people can sometimes offer constructive criticism to individual teachers, but generalized criticism of teachers and our profession is not often constructive. Content is important. So are other things.
Did I leave out the importance of having children explore? Shame on me.
LCT: it is generally true that teachers say they esteem critical thinking and problem solving over knowledge, I’m sure you’d agree. Some generalizations are fair.
You can’t do critical thinking without content. You can imbibe content w/o critical thinking.
Well, at least in math, critical thinking is part of the content. 1492 maybe meaningful in history, but in a math class it’s only meaningful if the kids understand at some level (which changes with age), what the number 1492 means.
I do not really understand why it’s important to try to separate content, understanding, critical thinking. I suspect, it’s not even possible.
Just because “knowledge transmission” is repeated many times (even in the professional literature on education) doesn’t make it clear, what that is.
“Kids, today we are going to talk about the great kings of England and their conquests that made their country the most powerful force in the Western world.”
“Teacher, why should we care about these kings, their wives, their wars. I’d like to hear about my greatgreatgreatgreat grandfather and grandmother, who were part of the 99.9% of thye population at the time. What were they doing back then?”
“Well, today, I need to transmit a different knowledge to y’all, the one about the lives of the .1%.”
“Why?”
“Because when you grow up, your lives will be richer by knowing about Henry VIII and the fate of his wives. So sit back, and be quiet as you absorb the knowledge that has been portioned out for you today. You are not mature enough to ask question and practice your critical thinking.”
Teachers can be divided into two kinds, the ones who would LOVE that question and the ones who would have the opposite reaction. Ofc, it’s easy to say which of these would be able to meet the child’s request.
I love how you always reduce it to a caricature. Surely you’ve had many stimulating classes where you have imbibed knowledge. I certainly have.
Simplistic recipes always make me laugh: “Take four mediumsized eggs, three tablespoons of sugar, two knife-tips of salt, then mix this in a blender, at half speed, with the liquid you prepared right before sunrise.”
Simplistic declarations of what will work in education make it too easy to compare them to cookbook recipes.
Since you brought it up: in my case, I always became interested in a subject in school because of the teacher’s personality: exciting or enthusiastic or interesting or humorous or caring. If the teacher made little attempt to get to know the thoughts and opinions of the kids in the class, my interest in her subject was just to pass it. Without some degree of personal relationship, my desire to learn a subject was minimal.
Every year, I get together with my classmates of grades 1-8. We discuss endlessly our favorite and not so well loved teachers. While we have little disagreements in whom we liked, who impacted our lives and careers most, we have not been able to come up with a universal recipe for what made our successful teachers tick. The only common trait seem to be that these teachers apparently loved to come to class, loved to be with us. How much? Some even came to these meetings while they were alive.
Mate,
I was one of the kids who found it fascinating to learn about the great men (and a few women) of history. I never learned anything about my own ancestors. The family history didn’t go back before my grandparents.
I guess the point is that it’s not always clear what essential knowledge is, like who deserve to be called great men and women in history. In school, I learned that Hitler was terrible, then came the great Soviet army, led by their heroic generals, and liberated Hungary and Eastern Europe by ending the German occupation. It then turned out, when history got reevaluated, that these generals were not so great people, afterall, and the Soviets more or less occupied Eastern Europe for 40+ years—eight times longer than the Germans.
Of course, we cannot expect to learn about our own ancestors in school. Nevertheless, there is a nagging feeling that the 99.9% did the bulk of the work that shaped history. Still, the sources write about the kings and high priests and their lives, hence that’s what we learn about in school. Similarly to as we see it now: news outlets are preoccupied with discussing the aspirations of our political leaders and of the billionaires.
It appears that “knowledge transmission” often have problems with matching its content with reality and hence it cannot be the only way of learning. Similarly, critical thinking and other creative activities cannot exist without content, for we cannot think about nothing, as we cannot eat if we don’t have food.
“The Soviets more or less occupied Eastern Europe for 40+ years—eight times longer than the Germans.” — How many millions of Jews have the Soviets exterminated?
“Let us do what we’ve been doing an amazing job of for decades, educating ALL instead of some”.
Really???? Then what’s with the alarmingly low rates of literacy amongst African Americans? Why do I have to turn around and reteach adults that can’t read on even a 3rd grade level, although they managed to complete high school or get a GED?
Explain how that happened, when you all have done nothing short of “amazing” at teaching ALL for decades.
If only this could be on massive billboards across the nation: “When one begins with the tired and overused Nation at Risk falsehood that public education is broken, the whole argument — whatever it may be — falls apart.”
Sounds to me like Thonpson is going out of his way to be fair to this author. The “progressive” establishment cannot possibly be responsible for perceived ills in education since forces outside education have dominated reform efforts for two decades. I tend to react to those who make arguments with labels.
High stakes test and punish policy are directly responsible for a decline in content instruction. As far as blaming “progressive educators” for the decline as well, Thompson’s claim is an opinion unsubstantiated by clear evidence.
I don’t blame progressivism for the decline of content. Dang, I hardly ever met a teacher devoted to progressivism. I was surprised that she brought that old meme back. Maybe reformers are running out of new tactics of destruction. And RT, I think I did bend over backwards to be fair, but on the second read, after checking footnotes, I became blunter.
Scapegoating so-called liberal education is the One Percent Solution to end public education. They say, “Teachers are too forgiving. Teachers are too artsy. Your children need rigor and grit, standards and tests, Pearsonalization, privatization, the elimination of labor rights… to get rid of all the pinko hippie teachers.” It’s all rightwing propaganda.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that after having spent two decades championing the puerile ABSTRACT SKILLS LIST that is the Gates/Coleman Common [sic] Core [sic] for ELA, the same Deformers/Disrupters are now calling for knowledge-based education. LMAO. Talk about cluelessness!!! Heck of a job, Coleman, Petrilli! Heck of a job! Mission accomplished! LMAO This would be hilarious if it hadn’t been so tragic for an entire generation of students.
One of the major problems with the Gates/Coleman bullet list for ELA, and with the lowest-common-denominator groupthink previous “standards” that Coleman and Pimentel cribbed from when hacking together their list (which Gates paid for to make it easier to create and sell depersonalized education software), is that those “standards” are almost completely CONTENT FREE. They are an extremely vague ABSTRACT SKILLS LIST. Mastery of ELA consists of a great deal of descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) and a lot of procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The Common [sic] Core [sic] has led to extremely devolved ELA pedagogy and curricula that ignore the former and reduce the latter to vagaries, because that’s just what the Gates /Coleman “standards” do.
After decades of railing against state ELA “standards” that consisted of nothing but lists of vague, poorly conceived, abstract “skills,” E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and his Core Knowledge Foundation nonetheless initially embraced the Common [sic] Core [sic]. Why? Well, in the material AROUND the actual ELA “standards” (though not in the standards themselves), Coleman and Pimentel promised a great RETURN TO THE TEXT, to the reading of substantive, challenging, classic works, and that’s what Hirsch wanted. Hirsch soon realized that making this deal with the devil–with Gates’s Core–was a BIG mistake. The Common [sic] Core [sic] led to a vast devolution of ELA curricula and pedagogy into content-free skills exercises on practicing random “skills” from the bullet list on random snippets of isolated (but high-reading level and so supposedly “rigorous”) text. In other words, high-stakes testing on the Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list led to test preppy curricula and pedagogy that were everything Hirsch hated. You see, Hirsch had this idea that kids should read and talk and write about good books and poems and plays, not spend their days online doing “practice” of “skills.” And Hirsch, though brilliant and spot on with regard to the importance of knowledge, missed seeing that skills made concrete enough–thought of not as abstract faculties to be practiced but as PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE to be imparted and then used–are knowledge, too (.e.g, here are the rules for putting together a press release or a sonnet or a fable or a conventional short story; now, do that, follow that procedure), and he missed that some ELA “skills” are attained by automatic functions of the human mind in response to sufficiently rich ambient linguistic environments (e.g., the building of a large vocabulary and the creation of an internalized competence in the standard version of the grammar of a language).
In other words, as Masclow wrote, you can’t treat everything as a nail and wail at it with a hammer.
Now, as this truth that they’ve ignored knowledge education starts to sink into the Disrupters’ thick heads, expect them to take a good idea (that we should care about imparting knowledge to our students) and totally ruin it. Expect them to give us mindless fact regurgitation in so-called “competency-based” online “instruction.” Expect them, as Petrilli is doing, to call for replacing winning kids over to reading with stories and poems and nursery rhymes with doing Common [sic] Core [sic]-y exercises on snippets of science reading. I have two words for this: it’s idiotic.
And so I offer, as an antidote to the coming second wave of Disruption of ELA, the following little parable: At the beginning of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, an elderly man dies, and people find scattered about, in his pockets and elsewhere, lots of little pieces of paper. On each he has written a “truth” that someone in Winesburg lives by, and the old man’s theory is that once people accept one of these truths and starts to live by it–once they start treating it as an ideology–they become distorted by it, become grotesque. That intro to Winesburg, Ohio, is called, in fact, “The Book of the Grotesque,” and each of the stories that follows that intro illustrate one of these grotesqueries. Wallace Stevens put it this way: “Theology before breakfast sticks to the eye.” Expect, from these Disrupters, that knowledge-based education will become yet another theology, or, to change the metaphor, another hammer to beat kids with, and especially poor kids.
cx: Maslow, ofc
cx: “wale at it,” NOT “wail at it”
Bob,
Thank you for filling me in further. I’d sensed that something was happening along the lines you describe, but your background knowledge is very helpful. I’ll also be thinking further about your metaphor regarding multiple narratives.
Then and now, it seems so impossibly nutty that Gates/Coleman etc couldn’t see the inherent contradictions in their demands.
“Then and now, it seems so impossibly nutty that Gates/Coleman etc couldn’t see the inherent contradictions in their demands.”
I doubt they (Gates/Coleman) care about contradictions. Their eyes are on the bottom line, and since that was in order, things are fine as far as they are concerned. They don’t do philosophy.
Standards this
Standards that
What are the standards
That have so consumed
The teaching and learning process
Falsehoods through and through
Illegitimate and specious standards
Is what they are
Standards here
Standards there
How the hell did we get here
Before standards were there
“How can anyone be against having standards in the classroom, standards for behavior or learning? Kind of hard to argue against, eh! What is so wrong with holding students accountable to educational standards? Nothing! Except when the term standard is inappropriately and incorrectly used to mean one thing while purporting to signify another, in other words lacking fidelity to truth. . . .
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and all other state educational standards might be considered a documentary standard but in the development of the standards NO PROCEDURES HAVE FOLLOWED THE FORMAL PROTOCOL AND PROCESSES [my emphasis] as outlined by the ISO or government agencies in their development.
In addition to that and perhaps even worse is that the proponents of these standards claim that the CCSS are standards against which ‘student achievement’ can be measured. In doing so educational standards proponents claim the documentary standard (definition three) as a metrological standard (definition four). In doing so they are falsely claiming a meaning of standard that should not be given credence. . . .
Finally, what the proponents of the educational standards and standardized testing regime don’t appear to understand is that in many areas of human interactions and feelings there cannot be any measurement. How does one measure the love of one’s spouse, children, parents or friends? How does one measure what is going on in the heart and mind of a distressed person who has just lost a loved one? Why do we even begin to think that we can measure what goes on in the body and brain of the student who is learning any subject matter considering all the various hormonal and endocrinal influences occurring outside the individual’s control, with the hundreds of millions if not billions of neuronal firings going on at any given moment that partially influence what happens in the mind of the student in a teaching and learning situation? How do we believe that the thousands and thousands of environmental influences on each individual could begin to be measured and accounted for? Are proponents of the educational standards and standardized testing “measurement” regime that arrogant, hubristic and presumptuous to believe that they hold the key to supposedly measuring the teaching and learning process or more specifically, the learning, aka, student achievement, of an individual student?
Considering the facts of the misuse of language, logic and common sense as outlined above, the only wise course of action is to immediately cease and desist, to abandon, those malpractices that harm so many students and contravene the state’s responsibility in providing a public education for all students. The billions of dollars spent by states on the educational standards and standardize testing regime would then be freed up to provide a better education for all students through perhaps such things1 as smaller class sizes, needed social services, foreign language instruction, arts programs, etc. And the state, by approving and mandating the fake standards and false measuring of student learning that are the malpractices2 of educational standards and standardized testing, by not adhering to a regimen of fidelity to truth is surely guilty of not promoting ‘the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.'”
Quoted from Ch. 6 “Of Standards and Measurement” in “Infidelity to Truth: Educational Malpractices in American Public Education”
So true, all of it.
“Expect, from these Disrupters, that knowledge-based education will become yet another theology, ”
Yeah, I wonder how this will be stopped, Bob? And how do we make people realize, theologies have no place in education? That the lack of theologies is the only theology worth campaigning for? What Max Born (one of the few heroes of 20th century physics) says about science is, imo, valid for education as well.
But I believe that there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at cross-roads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.
I believe that there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at cross-roads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.
That is beautifully said. And profound.
Yes. How much of our science will eventually go the way of phlogiston, epicycles, the élan vital, and the luminiferous ether? I have no problem at all with warranted speculation, as long as it is understood by its proponents as such and proposed for debate and, better yet, for potential falsification.
It seems Wexler effectively declares herself to be a priest in the church of Hirsch and Willingham.
If there is anything we could learn from the last 15 years in education it is that believing and promoting the One True Method in education is wrong. Doing such a thing even in the Exact Sciences is foolish, but in education, which is most definitely not one of the sciences, is an original sin.
Those who think they can “prove” that the above statement is wrong, may start explaining what knowledge is, and then continue with whether all teachers do is transmit knowledge (whatever it is).
“. . . may start explaining what knowledge is. . .”
Yep! And we’ll be here another 2500-3000 years trying without success to determine that.
Beautifully, thoughtfully said, Mate!